The great thing about the horror genre is story ideas are endless, and Paramount has its hands on the next crowd favorite.

Directed by John Krasinski with a script he co-wrote with story creators Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, “A Quiet Place” (in theaters Friday) is set in a dystopian present where monsters who seek out their victims by sound are wiping out the human race. The survivors literally tip-toe through the world not saying a word.

The Abbot family — Lee (Krasinski), Evelyn (Emily Blunt), Regan (Millicent Simmonds), and Marcus (Noah Jupe) — think they have a system down that will keep them alive until someone can figure out how to destroy the monsters. But the opening sequence of “A Quiet Place” shows just how difficult everyday life is. Not giving anything away, let’s just say it’s an incident that affects the family dynamic for the rest of the movie, and has the story’s first of many jump scares.

The Abbots have stayed alive since the monsters first attacked. They have done so by living on a farm where the walking trails are lined by sand (so no sound is made when walking around), and by using cameras to monitor the property. The family is also building an underground bunker for a new addition to the family, as Evelyn is pregnant. When Lee isn’t trying to keep the family safe, he’s working on trying to get a hearing aid to work for Regan, who is deaf. In fact, for most of the movie the family members communicate through sign language, and there’s only a handful of actual spoken lines.

This all leads to an explosive ending where all the tricks the Abbots have come up with to survive are used (and mostly fail) and it’s their collective will to live that's their only chance for survival.

Simply put: The movie is really scary and you shouldn’t see it alone. Take a friend. Take two friends. Go to a showing that will have lots of people in the theater. In fact, the more people you see the movie with just builds up the fright even more. Because it's so silent (though it has a great score), every whisper in the theater (or smart phone sound) will just scare the heck out of you.

In an era when movie studios want projects that are big and loud, Krasinski shows here that an extremely clever story can still work for audiences.